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Summoning Knowledge in Plato’s Republic

Summoning Knowledge
in Plato’s Republic
Nicholas D. Smith
1
1
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Preface
PI. The Aim of This Book

In this book, I offer a partial interpretation of Plato’s Republic by characterizing it as
having education as one of its principal aims. It is not just a work that is about education,
though it certainly contains many passages and arguments that are about education. My
purpose in this book is to show, rather, that the Republic is a work intended most of all
to play a role in educating its readers. This claim, by itself, is perhaps not especially
controversial. Perhaps more controversial would be my claim that this educational role
is at least a focus—if not, as I actually suspect, the main focus—of the work as a whole.
The Republic has received intense critical and scholarly attention. One of its first
critics was Plato’s own student, Aristotle, who subjects a version of the Republic to a
series of thoughtful criticisms in Book II of the Politics.1 More recently, interpretations
of the Republic have run the gamut from characterizations of it as serious political the-
ory to assessments that it was, instead, intended for comic effect. Since Plato himself
never reports directly what his intentions were in writing the work, and since the work
continues to be tantalizingly tricky to interpret, it is not surprising that scholars have
expressed such a diversity of general views. My own contribution herein will simply
add to this diversity by suggesting a somewhat different overall appraisal of what Plato
intended to achieve in writing the work. I claim only that this focus will help to shed
light on some of its most puzzling and difficult aspects.
As I said at the very beginning, however, I intend herein only to offer a partial inter-
pretation of Plato’s greatest work. In case it is not perfectly obvious to anyone who has
read the Republic, there is a good deal more to this work than just the topics I will dis-
cuss in this book, and by leaving the others in soft focus I do not at all intend to imply
that they are not important. I wrote my doctoral dissertation on Plato’s Republic (com-
pleted in 1975), and have spent the rest of my career hoping that someone (not I) would
have the gumption and the skill to complete a truly comprehensive study of the work,
comparable, say, to the four-volume treatment of Aristotle’s Politics by Newman
(1887). Perhaps the closest anyone has come to that goal remains James Adam’s edition
with commentary and notes (Adam 1963; first published in 1902). At any rate, this
book is not such a project.
In announcing my focus in this book as a focus on how Plato aims to educate his
readers, however, I risk starting my own readers right out with several very serious
false expectations. To explain this comment completely, I will need the rest of the
1 I say “a version of the Republic,” because there is evidence that Aristotle’s criticisms were actually
aimed at an earlier version of the Republic—one that lacked what are now the middle books of the work.
For discussion, see Nails 1995: 116–22 and Nails 1998: 393–4.
vi Preface
chapters of this book to make my case, but as a start, I mean that the way in which we
tend to think of education would already put us on the wrong foot for understanding
what Plato is doing. Increasingly (and to me, distressingly), we think of education as a
matter of transmitting information to people who don’t already know it, and more
importantly, we think that what they need to come to know are the sorts of things they
can use to make a living. I suspect that Plato would have found such a notion of the
value of education to be not only brutally reductive, but also ethically useless. If even
the most casual readers of the Republic remember nothing else about the work, they
are at least likely to recall one of Plato’s most controversial proposals: to deny the
rulers access to private property or any opportunity to amass personal wealth. It is
true that the rulers will “make a living” in some monkish sense, but it can hardly be
further from Plato’s intention that by giving his future rulers the most rigorous pro-
gram of education ever proposed, his goal was to ensure them thereby an advantage
with respect to the aim of amassing wealth. This small example gives perhaps a vivid
reason why we do well to guard against our own anachronistic impulses when we
read and try to understand Plato’s work. Unfamiliar treatments of many of our most
basic concepts are everywhere in Plato. Indeed, it was my experience of the alienness
of Plato’s vision that first attracted me to it. Like it or not, we are not going to get
anywhere as thinkers by reading only things that we agree with, or that express our
own most fondly cherished views of things. Reading Plato—for reasons I hope to
explore in detail in this book—is extremely unlikely to produce such experiences of
comfortable familiarity. Even so, I think we can achieve a fruitful and interesting
understanding of his work.
So while I do think that the Republic is an educational work at heart, I also think that
what Plato understands education to consist in and how it is best achieved does not
align with what we normally consider when we think about this subject. Moreover,
while Plato also connects education with knowledge, the connection that he makes is,
I claim, radically different from the one we would typically find in our own explanations
of or approaches to either education or knowledge. I give a sketch of my case for these
claims in Chapter 1. Before I am able to explain what I regard as the most central fea-
ture of the Republic, then, I will need to explain just what education and knowledge are,
for Plato, so at least we can be in a better position to understand what he thinks he has
to offer to us, as his readers. I start with a discussion of what he says about knowledge
in Chapter 3. But before I get to that, I will try to show my readers (in Chapter 2) that
the very way in which Plato presents his thoughts in the Republic needs special atten-
tion. Briefly, I look carefully at two famous and controversial claims that Plato has
Socrates make, in Books II through IV, and show how they are presented as images of
what Plato wants us to think about. This kind of use of images, I will claim, is one of the
core features of the educational program in which Plato wishes to engage his readers.
Once I have discussed these issues, I then turn in the remaining chapters to what Plato
actually tells us about education—with an eye always to comparing what he says about
this subject to what we can see of what he is actually doing in the work itself.
Preface vii
P2. My Own Intended Readership

Anyone who hopes to gain anything from reading this book will have to have already
read Plato’s Republic, but should also probably be ready to look back at various parts of
the work again and again as part of the process of understanding and evaluating my
claims about it. But I am also hoping to explain things in ways that will make my argu-
ments accessible to readers who have only done this much, that is, who have read the
Republic and are prepared to look more carefully at it again at times along the way.
I will, for sure, often be addressing or at least noting the works of other scholars, and
it is part of scholarly writing that such attention is usually more for criticism than to
express approval. One of my own scholarly mentors, however, explained this process
in a way that is worth quoting. When explaining his own continuing criticisms of
Terence Irwin’s Plato’s Moral Theory (1977), Gregory Vlastos explained, “only those
who are strangers to the ethos of scholarly controversy will see anything but high
esteem in my critique” (Vlastos 1994, 39 n. 2). Just so—the criticisms of other scholars’
works herein are the clearest indications of how much my own thinking has been
moved (even pushed around!) by the challenges I confronted in these works, and as all
scholars know, it is often by setting our own views off against those of others that we are
able to make fully clear what it is that we have in mind. Accordingly, I hope other
scholars will find value in reading this book—if only (or perhaps especially) for taking
up and challenging their own works.
The scholarly literature on Plato’s Republic is beyond vast, however. It is, indeed, so
voluminous and appears in so many different languages that no single human could
ever hope to engage more than a tiny fraction of it. It is not my aim here to achieve even
as much of that as I might. I cannot doubt that there remain innumerably many excel-
lent works of scholarship that might well have allowed me to improve the argument
I offer here—or possibly, which would have inclined me to abandon it altogether.
I certainly expect that other scholars will notice these lacunae and hope only that if
they do, they will assist me by calling my attention to important works and arguments
that I have missed, as well as correcting any other errors I have made.
Even so, the readers I hope most of all to reach are not other professional scholars.
Instead, the ones I have in mind as my own intended readership are those seeking to
engage in the kinds of processes that are my focus in this book: teaching and learning.
My main aim is to help those who feel they would like some assistance in understand-
ing what Plato’s greatest work was all about, how it was intended to work, and most of
all, why Plato said so many things that readers inevitably find strange, or even outra-
geous. The “ethos of scholarly controversy” that I have been talking about actually has a
very long and distinguished history, one that I hope to illuminate as part of Plato’s own
technique in writing the Republic. Did he really mean all the things he has Socrates2
2 I will not be especially careful in this book about how I present the notorious problems involved in
Plato’s authorial relationship with the character of Socrates. In brief, it is my general view—and one that
I acknowledge is controversial—that when Plato has Socrates say something, he means for the reader to
viii Preface
endorse in the work? My answers to such questions will always be in something like the
form, “Yes . . . and no.” In ways that I hope to explain in several chapters of this book,
Plato was, I claim, intentionally provocative, because he thought that certain sorts of
provocations were of the utmost importance for intellectual and moral achievement.
Most of the main arguments I offer in this book are revised versions of arguments
I have already offered in various scholarly articles or chapters published elsewhere.
I acknowledge these below. The revisions have been made with an eye to making things
easier for the readers I am trying to reach, and one effect of this effort is that in many
places where scholars reading this book might expect dense annotation and citation
of other scholars’ works, they will instead get only some few citations, including some
to my own earlier works—works in which I did make the effort to cite other scholars’
works much more extensively. I have tried herein to engage more explicitly with works
that have appeared since the publication of my own earlier articles and chapters. I have
also sometimes elected not to duplicate extensive citations that appeared in my earlier
works, and have rather simply noted here where these may be found.
P3. Texts and Translations

Throughout, when I cite passages from the Republic, unless noted otherwise, I will be
citing the most recently published Oxford Classical Text of the Republic (Slings 2003) in
the standard form of Stephanus page, section letter, and line number of the Greek text.
My citations of passages from other Platonic texts will also be from the Greek texts
given in the Oxford Classical Texts.
Any good contemporary translation of the Republic should suffice for my readers to
follow my arguments, and serious readers should always avoid translations that do not
at least provide the Stephanus page numbers and section letters in the columns, so that
these can be used as guides when discussing the texts with (or reading scholarship by)
others who may not be using the same translations, or may rely entirely just on the Greek.
Because it is the most widely used collection of English translations of Plato’s works,
my own quotations will usually be those given in Cooper 1997 (by G. M. A. Grube and
revised by C. D. C. Reeve), but I often found I could not always use these without some
revision, and have noted it when I did revise this translation.
I have tried not to talk about the Greek in ways that would make it difficult for those
who have not learned the language to follow what I say. When I thought it would be
useful, I have given transliterations of relevant Greek terms, so that those who do
take what Socrates says to be worthy of serious philosophical consideration. As for whether Plato himself
accepts everything that he has Socrates say, my readers will find that my view of this is more equivocal: he
means for us to take what Socrates says seriously and thoughtfully enough to consider it as a candidate for
philosophical acceptance or for philosophical revision or refutation. My own readers should by all means
take the same point of view when they read the things that I say: perhaps they are right, but if they are
wrong, please show me why they need revision or refutation.
Preface ix
know the language can see how I am understanding the term. I have avoided using
untransliterated Greek.
It should be clear from what I have already said that my focus in this book is entirely
on the Republic. I have actually avoided any comparisons to other Platonic texts,
because I am not inclined to think that the points of view I find in the Republic are
always the same as those to be found in his other works. Those looking for a broader
account of Plato’s entire philosophy should look elsewhere.
Acknowledgments
I have been writing about Plato’s Republic from the time I was an undergraduate, and
my doctoral dissertation and most of my earliest professional publications were on the
Republic. Most of my earliest works do not now seem to me to have been well enough
conceived or argued to include in any way herein, though in several of them I made my
first attempts to wrestle with things that I now think I managed to explain better in
later writings. But even in my later writings, I have often changed my mind about how
some text or argument was to be understood, and that processes continued as I was
working on this book. Some of these later writings, accordingly, have been revised
(sometimes substantially) and incorporated into various parts of this book, as follows:
Sections 1.2.1–1.2.6 are revisions of “Plato’s Book of Images,” in Philosophy in
Dialogue, edited by G. A. Scott. Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2007,
pp. 3–14. Copyright © 2007 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2007. All
rights reserved.
Section 1.2.7 is a revision of “Preface: Paradoxes of Platonic Imagination,” preface to
R. Jenks, How the Images in Plato’s Dialogues Develop a Life of Their Own. Lewiston,
NY: Edwin Mellon. 2011, ix–xviii. Reprinted content with permission by Edwin Mellon.
Section 2.1 is a revision of “Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State,” The Journal of Ethics
3: 1999. Reprinted by permission from Springer Nature. Copyright © 1999 Kluwer
Academic Publishers .
Section 3.1 is a revision of “Plato on Knowledge as a Power,” copyright © Johns
Hopkins University Press. This article was first published in Journal of the History of
Philosophy 38.2 (2000), 145–68. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins
University Press.
Section 3.2.1–3.2.3 are revisions of “Plato on the Power of Ignorance,” Oxford Studies
in Ancient Philosophy suppl.: Virtue and Happiness: Essays in Honour of Julia Annas, ed.
R. Kamtekar (2012): 51–73. Reproduced by permission of Oxford University Press:
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/virtue-and-happiness-9780199646043.
Sections 5.2.1–5.2.4 are revisions of “Plato’s Divided Line,” Ancient Philosophy
16 (1996): 25–46. Reprinted content with permission from Ancient Philosophy.
Sections 5.2.6–5.2.7 and 7.2.1 are revisions of “Unclarity and the Intermediates in
Plato’s Discussions of Clarity in the Republic,” Plato Journal 18 (2018): 97–110.
Reprinted content with permission from the Plato Journal.
Section 6.2 is a revision of “How the Prisoners in Plato’s Cave Are ‘Like Us,’ ” in
J. J. Cleary and G. M. Gurtler, eds., Proceedings of the Boston Area Colloquium 13, 187–204.
Reprinted content with permission by Brill.
Section 6.3 is a revision of “Return to the Cave,” in M. McPherran, ed., Plato’s
Republic: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2010): 83–102.
Copyright © 2018, reproduced with permission.
xii Acknowledgments
My professional work on Plato’s Republic now spans over four decades, and along
the way I have been helped and influenced by far too many other scholars to name
here. Again, even when I am making clear how I disagree with some other scholar, I am
very much indebted to those whose works have seemed to me to merit such responses.
I have also benefited from detailed comments on an earlier draft of this book, which
were very generously given to me prior to submission by Hugh H. Benson and Damien
Storey, and then, as referees for Oxford University Press after submission by Rachana
Kamtekar and Debra Nails, both of whom agreed to come out from anonymity, since
I was so very pleased and impressed by their thoughtful, detailed criticisms and sug-
gestions. I cannot adequately express my gratitude to these wonderful colleagues for
the time and effort they put into responding so graciously to my many confusions. It is
not at all their fault that so many confusions still remain herein. Had I followed every
one of their many suggestions, the book would no doubt be much improved . . . but still
unfinished! Hugh agreed to read the book because we have done this sort of thing for
each other so many times in the past. Although I have not yet met Damien in person,
he and I have now been corresponding and exchanging our written works for a few
years, and our lengthy discussions have been exciting and challenging for me. Rachana
and Debra are professional colleagues from whom I have learned a great deal over the
years. Every time I have read any of these fine scholars’ works or criticisms of mine, I have
been persuaded to abandon, amend, or at least clarify considerably my own thoughts.
It is relationships like these that have made my life as a scholar so very satisfying.
Three other people deserve special mention for the help they have provided to me
over my career. The first of these is Keith Lehrer, the man who taught the very first
course in philosophy that I ever took, as a somewhat unready seventeen-year-old
freshman in college. His recent work in what he calls “exemplarization,” or “exemplar
representation,” by which we generate our conceptions of things, puts into the clearest
theoretical terms a notion that I had been trying to articulate about Plato’s epistemol-
ogy for many years now. In a forthcoming work (Lehrer forthcoming), he applies what
he has been working on more generally to the interpretation of Plato, and it has been
a joy and very educational for me to discuss this with him along the way. My own use
of his ideas appears throughout this work, but I seek to explain it especially in Chapter 3.
Keith has also always been extraordinarily supportive throughout my career, and I can
never possibly repay all of my debts to him.
As for the other two, I met both of these for the first time at a National Endowment
for the Humanities Summer Seminar at Princeton University, in 1976: the director of
the seminar (on “The Moral and Social Philosophy of Socrates and Plato”), Gregory
Vlastos, and one of my fellow seminarians, Thomas C. Brickhouse. Gregory became a
significant mentor (and, following the “ethos of scholarly controversy,” an important
source of criticisms of my work, and whose works I have frequently targeted in my own
criticisms). Tom quickly became a lifelong friend and collaborator, with whom I have
now written several books and scores of articles on Socrates. What few now realize
about our long collaboration is that it formed around the sharing of two projects. The
Acknowledgments xiii
one that led to so many further collaborations was about Socrates’ counterpenalty offer
in Plato’s Apology (Brickhouse and Smith 1982); but the other project, with which I still
mostly agree and which I have revisited and cited again herein, was on Plato’s Republic
(Brickhouse and Smith 1983). The work Tom did for Vlastos’s seminar in 1976 later
appeared as Brickhouse 1981 and seemed to me at the time (and still seems to me) to be
one of the best things ever written about one of the most interesting problems of inter-
pretation of the Republic. I discuss this important work, and indicate my minor dissent
from it, in Chapter 6. To these three fellow travelers and to everyone else I cite herein,
but also to all of the inquisitive undergraduate and graduate students I have had in my
classes and seminars on the Republic, I will always be indebted.
Contents
1. Introduction 1
2. Images of Justice 23
3. The Powers of Comprehension 58
4. The Sun and the Good 81
5. The Divided Line 96
6. The Cave 125
7. Higher Education 159
8. Some Closing Remarks 181
Bibliography of Sources Cited 187

Index of Passages 197
General Index 201
1
Introduction
1.1 Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions

of Knowledge and Education
1.1.1 What education does and how it works
Let us start with a few commonplaces about knowledge and education. These
commonplaces are so familiar to all of us that they end up very much getting in the way
of our understanding of Plato. They get in the way because Plato, I will claim, does not
actually accept any of them, whereas we tend to begin the process of interpreting Plato
with these commonplaces already assumed. If I am right that Plato does not actually
accept these basic assumptions, and that we presuppose them in our interpretations
of Plato, then it follows that our interpretations of Plato go wrong right from the start.
So, to begin:
C1i: Education gives students access to new information, of which they were (at least
mostly) unaware, prior to being taught the new information. Learning, accordingly,
means learning new information.
This, as we are often told, is the ‘information age,’ and what learning and education
(whether formal or informal) achieves is a net gain in information—allowing a suc-
cessful student to go from a condition in which he or she mostly or even wholly lacks
some information (information about some subject matter, such as biology or eco-
nomics, for examples), to a condition in which he or she has learned that information,
and now knows it. Before I took that class in biology, I had never heard of prions, and
didn’t know such things could cause diseases. But now I know it, because I learned it in
that class. Now, some educators insist that providing new information to students is
hardly all that happens in education, and some would even go so far as to say that it is
not actually the main aim of education. But to most people, such claims would seem
either very controversial and provocative, or perhaps might even sound like a kind of
special pleading by so-called ‘educators’ who really are not delivering to students what
they are supposed to be delivering. To be fair, however, we should remind ourselves that
there really is something else to education than mere transmission of information.
When one takes a class in accounting, for example, part of what is supposed to result is
not just that the student comes to know things about accounting that he or she did not
know before (the informational aspect), but also that the student becomes more nearly
2 introduction
able to be an accountant, that is, to do accounting. If the commonplace in C1i is aptly

called the ‘informational’ assumption about education, then this further goal would be
what might be called the ‘skill’ assumption:
C1s: What students get, from education, is not just new information but also new
skills—skills they did not have before getting the education.
By the time a student graduates with a degree in accounting, he or she should be able to
do accounting, to be an accountant—at least to a sufficient degree as to be able to get a
job and work effectively in that area. Before taking any of the classes in the curriculum,
the student would not have been able to do much, if any, actual accounting. He or she
went from having no skill to having (ideally) considerable skill, in accounting.
C1i and C1s seem like two very different models of education, and educators have
strongly debated which of these two models is really the most important, and which
should do most of the ‘driving’ when it comes to planning educational curricula. But
the two models indicated in C1i and C1s have at least one thing in common: education
is supposed to give the student something that he or she lacks prior to the education,
whether the lack is one of information or one of skill.
In Book VII of the Republic, just after offering his memorable image of the Cave,
Plato begins to talk about the curricula by which the best students of the kallipolis
(Plato’s word, meaning ‘fine city,’ for the community he creates in the work; see 527c2)
can be brought to the point where they can actually rule the state. I will talk in more
detail about each of these curricular steps later, but for now, it is worth looking care-
fully at what Plato has Socrates say to Glaucon about education:
Education isn’t what some people declare it to be, namely, putting knowledge into souls that
lack it, like putting sight into blind eyes.
They do say that.
But our present discussion, on the other hand, shows that the power to learn is present in
everyone’s soul and the instrument with which each learns is like an eye that cannot be turned
around from the darkness to light without turning the whole body. This instrument cannot be
turned around from that which is coming into being without turning the whole soul until it is
able to study that which is and the brightest thing that is, namely, the one we call the good. Isn’t
that right?
Yes.
Then education is the craft concerned with doing this very thing, this turning around, and
with how the soul can most easily and effectively be made to do it. It isn’t the craft of putting sight
into the soul. Education takes for granted that sight is there but that it hasn’t turned the right
way or looking where it ought to look, and it tries to redirect it appropriately. (518b8–d7)
Before getting to this point, Plato has already covered a lot of philosophical ground, and
we will not well understand what is going on until we look a lot more closely at a number
of important passages that come before this one. But even the most cursory reading of
this passage should make it clear enough that one of the things Plato has Socrates
emphatically reject in this passage is the very point shared equally in C1i and C1s,
Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions of Knowledge and Education 3
which is that education puts something into the student that is not already there,
whether information or skill. Now, to be sure, Plato was obviously aware that people
could and did learn new information or skills, and the education that Plato promotes
will also certainly have these effects. But this passage shows that such acquisitions are
not what Plato thinks should be the primary aims of education. Instead, Plato recog-
nizes a ‘power’ in the soul that he likens to the power of sight—powers that all of us
already have, but which need to be aroused, focused, and strengthened if they might
best achieve their proper results. As I will show (especially in Chapter 3), it is these goals,
with respect to our innate cognitive power to know, that education should be designed
to achieve. New information and skills will come, when they do, as by-products of this
arousing, focusing, and strengthening of the cognitive power already in our souls.1 In
this book, I propose to explain not only the theoretical grounds that Plato gives for this
view of education, but also to expose the specific ways in which he is actually engaging
in this process with his readers, by ‘summoning,’ as I put it in the title of the book, the
readers’ ‘power to learn.’ At any rate, I hope it is clear enough that what Plato has in
mind is different from what we would get if he were starting out with assumptions C1i
and/or C1s.
1.1.2 Knowledge as an educational goal

Everyone who is interested in the topic of education—including Plato—also recog-
nizes that there is some connection to be made (at least in ideal circumstances) between
educational advancement and also advancement in knowledge. We might encode this
into another commonplace:
C2: Education, at least if successful, produces knowledge in the student.
But the passage just quoted above already shows what is wrong with this commonplace
when it comes to understanding Plato: Plato had Socrates make very plain that educa-
tion, at least as he is discussing it in the Republic, is not about putting into people what
is not already there, but is instead about reorienting what is already there. So education
does not produce knowledge, but instead takes what is already in the soul and redirects
what is there in a way that allows the goals of education (which are not identified in this
passage) to be gained. So if we begin with the assumption that something like C2 must
be what Plato has in mind, we will start the process in a way that hinders, rather than
helps, the process of interpretation and understanding.
Almost certainly, one of the reasons we will get off on the wrong foot has to do
with what we tend to think about knowledge, what it is and what it requires.
Contemporary theory of knowledge is an area of continuing significant controversy
among epistemologists, and as a result there is actually very little that can be said, in
1 A very clear discussion of this aspect of Plato’s view of education may be found in Reeve 2010. The
account that I offer in this book is similar in many ways to what Reeve argues therein, though I will note
occasional differences in our views as they become relevant.
4 introduction
general, about precisely how we should understand knowledge. But at the risk of some
misrepresentation of these debates, there are some basic features of contemporary
theory of knowledge that are common across all—or at least most—of the extant views
in the field.2 What I propose to offer is the merest template of what such a theory would
include, but it will hopefully be enough to show how terribly misplaced any of the many
varieties of such theories will be as a way to understand what Plato intends.
Epistemologists, I claim, generally agree that whatever the right theory of knowledge
turns out to be, it must have at least four necessary features. The first of these is generally
called the ‘truth’ condition. Some epistemic agent (S) knows something (p) only if
what S knows is true. No one can know that whales are big fish, because whales aren’t
fish—they’re mammals. Now, someone might think they know that whales are big fish,
but they’d be wrong, because no one can know what is false. Epistemologists have
found some reason to tinker with the ‘truth condition,’ but the main idea behind the
condition seems to be generally accepted; you can’t know it if what you supposedly
know is wrong.
Now, there are some differences among epistemologists about precisely how this
condition is supposed to be formulated, but it is worth noting that whatever we say
about this, the basic thought seems to be that what is known is in some sense informa-
tional. As noted above, not all information is true: the information that whales are big
fish is false information. In some theories of knowledge, the information itself is said to
be propositional, which is to say that it is the kind of information that is expressed as the
meaning of a declarative sentence. There may be different ways to actually expressing
the same information (in English, for example, or in Spanish), but what is known, no
matter what language is used to express it, is the same (at least in theory).
We might think of the relevant information as at least propositionalizable, even if
not actually propositionalized by a given knower at a given time. So, for example, we
might think we know, as we are driving a car, that another car is approaching us at a
roughly 90° angle as we enter an intersection, but not actually have, before our minds,
as it were, this information actually encoded in some propositional form. We might
have access to such information in such a way as to know it, even if we are not actually
thinking in whole sentences, as if saying to ourselves: ‘There is another car approach-
ing the intersection from that side street.’ But we need not worry about whether the
information is actually propositionalized in the way we manage it in any given case, in
knowing; it matters only that such information is of a sort as to be propositionalizable,
which is why contemporary theories of knowledge are said to analyze what is called
‘propositional knowledge.’ This sort of knowledge is sometimes compared and con-
trasted to other kinds, such as ‘knowledge by acquaintance’ (I know your Uncle Jim!)
or know-how (Mary knows how to ride a bike). But it is safe to say that the primary
focus of contemporary theories of knowledge is on propositional knowledge.
2 I offer my own version of such a theory in my book with Ian Evans on the theory of knowledge (Evans
and Smith 2012).
One thing we can immediately notice about propositional knowledge, however, is

that it is most certainly the kind of thing that we can fail to have and then (if the right
things happen, perhaps) come to have. Accordingly, propositional knowledge fits the
model of education provided in our second commonplace (C2) extremely well: one
way of understanding the connection between education and knowledge is to under-
stand that education produces (propositional) knowledge, by taking students who do
not know certain information and getting them to the point that they do know it. But
we have also already seen some reason to think that whatever Plato has in mind when
he has Socrates talk about education in Book VII of the Republic, it is not the sort of
thing that can be put into the student who starts out by lacking it. Hence, we already
have some reason to think that whatever Plato has in mind as ‘knowledge’ is not likely
to be ‘propositional knowledge’ of the sort we attempt to analyze in contemporary
theories of knowledge, since that sort of knowledge is something we can lack and then
acquire. Propositional knowledge may certainly be gained along the way in Plato’s
model of education; but it seems unlikely that such knowledge will be the focus of an
education that is not aimed at the acquisition of what the student does not already have.
And yet, it is fair to say that this model of knowledge—‘propositional knowledge’—is
precisely the model that philosophers and scholars are the most familiar with and are
thus likely to assume when they begin the process of interpreting Plato’s Republic. As
we will soon see, variations of this model are endorsed as the right way to understand
Plato’s theory by a number of scholars, and I have already given one indication of why
I am very skeptical about such interpretations and find them wrongheaded. In addition
to this reservation, however, there is at least one other, of at least equal weight.
In the case of ‘propositional knowledge,’ what is known is some information about
the world, perhaps encoded in some proposition or perhaps in some other way. But the
basic idea is that it is information, and information of a sort that at least can be encoded
in propositional form. When we talk about the relationship between knowledge and
the known, in this model, we say that the knowledge is ‘of ’ or ‘about’ the known, as
subject matter, which indicates what philosophers call an ‘intensional’ relation. This
aspect of ‘propositional knowledge,’ however, already creates some difficulty as a lens
through which to understand Plato’s conception of knowledge. In Book V, arguably the
main discussion of knowledge in the Republic, Plato makes a distinction between
knowledge (epistēmē or gnōsis), opinion or belief (doxa), and ignorance (agnoia). Each
one is characterized as a power (dunamis; see 477b4–6 and 477c1–e4, 478a13–14), and
such powers, he tells us, are to be distinguished in virtue of what they are related to, and
what they accomplish (477d1–2). In the case of knowledge, we are told that it is related
to ‘what is’ (to on), and while scholars have offered different accounts of what that might
mean, I think the text makes clear enough that what Plato has in mind as ‘what is’ are
the forms of his famous metaphysical theory. So, in Plato’s theory, what is known are
the forms. Unless forms are propositions, or consist in propositionalizable information
of some sort, the idea that Plato’s relation between knowledge and the known is the
one we find between ‘propositional knowledge’ and the known is mistaken. On the
6 introduction
face of it (and despite some very sophisticated pleas by interpreters who nonetheless
think this is the right way to understand Plato), it looks rather like forms are abstract
objects that are not linguistic in the appropriate way. Forms give the names of predi-
cates (e.g. the good itself, where ‘X is good’ predicates goodness of X), and thus are
not true or false in the way of propositions (such as we find with ‘there is a car approach-
ing the intersection from the right of me,’ or ‘whales are big fish’). Now, Plato does say
that the forms possess the highest degree of truth or reality (alētheia), and one might take
this as an indication that there really is, after all, the right kind of connection between
knowledge and truth to understand Plato’s theory as explaining some version of ‘prop-
ositional knowledge.’ But even here, a problem arises. In contemporary sentential
(propositional) logic, sentences or propositions are said to have only two truth values
(provided, of course, that they are actually well formed so as to be propositions or
declarative sentences at all): a sentence or proposition is either true or it is false. Truth,
as it applies to propositions, is what philosophers call a ‘threshold concept’ (like being
tall enough to ride on the roller coaster)—there is no such thing as one thing being
more true or truer than something else that is true; something is either true (or tall
enough to ride on the roller coaster) or not. Once the threshold has been reached, there
are no further degrees of achievement in the relevant domain. If the threshold for
riding on the roller coaster is being at least four feet tall, then someone who is six feet
tall is no more allowed to ride on the roller coaster than someone who just barely makes
the four-foot minimum. Tallness comes in degrees, of course, but being tall enough to
ride on the roller coaster does not. The same is true of being a true proposition; it is a
matter of ‘yes’ or ‘no.’ We will be looking at several passages that make this point clearly,
but for now, I will just insist that for Plato, whatever he means by ‘alētheia,’ the qualifi-
cation comes in degrees; forms have the highest degree of this qualification, but other
things also have some, but to a lesser degree. So whatever Plato’s ‘alētheia’ measures, it
does not seem to measure the kind of truth that is achieved (or fails to be achieved) by
propositions.
To be clear, then, both for Plato and in contemporary epistemology, knowledge
engages truth. But what Plato means by truth (which is part of what I explore in
Chapter 2) is the degree to which something completely or unambiguously exemplifies
the kind of thing it is (or appears to be). In other words, if we say of some specific thing,
X, that it has the property or quality of being F, or being an example of F-ness, then
Plato’s conception of truth will be the measure of the degree to which X really is F—as
opposed to being only somewhat, partially, or equivocally F. Famously, Plato argues
(with consequences that I will explore in the remaining chapters of this book) that items
in the sensible world are never entirely, purely, or unequivocally F, for at least most
properties or qualities we might substitute for F. The only things that are purely, wholly,
and unequivocally what they are, are the forms. To say that this metaphysical theory
impacts everything he says about knowledge and education is no overstatement. But at
the very least, it also has very important consequences on what he spends so much of
his time talking about in the Republic. When he imagines a ‘noble state’ and describes
the characteristics that make it just, this same metaphysical theory blocks any chance
that Plato might suppose he has actually conceived an ideal. There is only one thing that
is perfectly just, and that is the just itself, the form of justice. So it is not entirely true, in
Plato’s sense, to call the kallipolis ‘just’; it is only more or less true. It is more or less true
because the kallipolis is only more or less just—it is, as Plato tells about the kallipolis
and so many other things to which he calls our attention in the Republic, an image and
not the reality (the form) that it images. This same equivocal feature is one I will call my
readers’ attention to often in this book, because it seems to me to be critical that we
bear it in mind when we read Plato’s words. In brief, I will claim that the Republic is a
work that presents images of reality (or truth)—and not reality/truth itself—to its
readers. This process, as we will discover, has an important place in Plato’s conception
of education. But it also means that we must continually remind ourselves that Plato
should not generally be taken as ‘telling us the truth’ or announcing something like a
philosophical doctrine about what he discusses, because he thinks that real truth can
only be achieved when the subject of our attention is the forms. Plato certainly wants
us to attend to the forms, what they are, how they are, and how they are imaged by the
things in the world around us. But most of what Plato talks about in the Republic does
not belong to the world of the forms. Instead, it belongs to the world we inhabit and
engage through perception (or imagination), whose contents, as Plato insists, both are
and are not everything whatever they seem to be. So, too, the Republic, which is rich in
details about ethics and politics, provides us with images of what is really good and
really just. But since Plato has given us images only, we need to be alert to their limita-
tions and not assume that Plato supposed his images to be without flaws. Part of what I
claim in this book is that the readers’ being alert to these flaws will bring him or her
closer to comprehending the real truth, which is the only domain where knowledge,
fully realized, can come into contact with what is flawless.
The second condition that appears in virtually all contemporary analyses of
knowledge is the so-called ‘belief ’ condition. S knows that p only if S believes that p.
There are any number of theories and explanations about what is required, or what it
means, for something to be a belief, but all that is needed is the basic intuition, which is
that knowledge is a cognitive state of some sort. To say that it must be cognitive is to say
that it is some kind of mental representation of the world (or whatever the subject mat-
ter happens to be) as being a certain way. Being in this state—representing the world
(or whatever the subject matter happens to be) as being a certain way—is one of the
conditions for knowing, and each case of knowing will be a case of being in such a state.
There are, obviously, other conditions that must be met, and we have already seen one
of these: the representation of the way the world is has to be correct and not incorrect
(the ‘truth condition’ must also be met, that is).
So there can be true beliefs and also false beliefs, and those that count as knowledge
will never include the latter, only the former. There can also be true beliefs that are not
knowledge, because they do not satisfy still other requirements (about which, see below).
But it is enough for us to see at least this much: in contemporary theory of knowledge,
8 introduction
knowledge is a species of belief. Not every instance of belief will be knowledge, but
every instance of knowledge will also be an instance of belief.
Here, too, we should quickly begin to suspect that this model of knowledge will be a
poor fit for the account of knowledge we get in the Republic. In Book V, Plato has
Socrates distinguish three cognitive powers (again, knowledge, opinion, and ignorance),
and none are said to be included in the other as species of the other, in the way that we
regard knowledge as a species of belief. Many translations try to avoid this problem by
having the distinctions made in Book V be between knowledge, opinion, and ignor-
ance (so our generic term for a cognitive state, ‘belief ’ might be supposed to apply to all
of them), but few scholars would really be willing to say that in Book V Plato was
explaining how knowledge was a kind of belief. Plato does have Glaucon say that one
difference between knowledge and opinion is that the former is infallible whereas the
latter is fallible (477e7–8), and so it might easily look as if the distinction between
true and false is being employed, in such a way as to assure that knowledge is always
true whereas opinion is sometimes true and sometimes false, which would map onto
contemporary analyses of propositional knowledge rather well. In chapter 3, below,
however, I will argue that even this appearance is misleading. For now, it is enough to
note with concern that, at least in Book V, he does not seem to be making the sort of
genus/species categorization that we would expect if what he had in mind is our con-
ception of knowledge as a species of belief.
In contemporary theories, as I said, there are four general features, and I have now
mentioned two of these—the ‘truth condition’ and the ‘belief condition.’ The third con-
dition epistemologists have required is what is called the ‘justification condition.’ It is
not enough, we are told, for someone to have a true belief about p. To know that p, one
must not just believe that p, where p is true; one must also be justified in holding that
belief. It is obviously possible to believe something that is true without knowing it, if,
for example, the way in which one comes to believe it is at all faulty, or if the reasons
why one believes it are simply not adequate to support the belief as real knowledge.
Suppose I believe some scientific claim because my very dear (but not very scientific)
grandmother told me that it is true. Suppose, further, that her reasons for believing it
were that she used a Ouija board and asked if the claim in question were true, and
received the answer ‘yes.’ No one would be willing to say that my belief counts as
knowledge even if (bucking the odds, one might think!) the scientific claim in question
actually turned out to be true. In such a case, one would satisfy both the ‘truth condition’
and the ‘belief condition’ for knowledge, but not satisfy the ‘justification condition.’
Precisely what we are to make of justification and what kind or degree of justification
is required for knowledge is a matter of considerable controversy among e pistemologists.
These, however, need not concern us. Of greater moment, for our purposes, is that we
can find abundant evidence that Plato was very interested in questions of justification,
generally, and characterizes Socrates as someone who is always interested in finding
out how well his interlocutors are able (or, as we usually discover, are unable) to justify
claims that they make. What should worry us is not that the evidence of Plato’s interest
in justification might be somehow misleading, but rather (again) that there is another
feature of this criterion of knowledge that does not seem all that well suited to the way
Plato has Socrates talk about knowledge and opinion in Book V. Modern treatments of
justification all note that the relation between knowledge and other kinds of true belief
will co-vary in terms of the degree or kind of justification that the agent has. In effect,
the difference between knowledge and other types of true belief is a difference in terms
of degree of justification. To put it bluntly, this is simply not how Plato has Socrates
explain the difference between knowledge, opinion, and ignorance in the important
discussion in Book V of the Republic. Instead, we are told that the way to distinguish
the different kinds of cognitions is in terms of what kinds of things they are related to
(‘set over’) and what they accomplish (477d1–2). I am not claiming that Plato’s stated
criteria could not possibly be understood in terms of degrees or kinds of justification
(though I certainly do think that any such attempt would produce a misunderstanding);
rather, my claim for now is only that such an understanding is anything but obvious
when we read the passage itself. So my intention is simply to express some reasons for
thinking that our commonplace preconceptions about the topics we encounter in Plato
are not necessarily good guides for interpretation.
The final feature of contemporary theories of knowledge is not likely a matter of
much concern, because it was generated by a problem first articulated in a famous paper
in epistemology published in 1963 (Gettier 1963)—the so-called ‘Gettier problem,’
named after the author of that famous paper, Edmund Gettier. The gist of this problem
is that even justified true belief will sometimes not count as knowledge, if something
has gone wrong in the justification (such as part of what justifies one in believing turns
out to be false, despite the person having very good reasons to think that it is true). The
Gettier problem has generated an impressive and controversial literature, but there is
no reason (that I know of, at any rate) for thinking that Plato anticipated any part(s) of
this literature by well over two millennia.
When we encounter philosophical works from another language and another era, it
can be comforting, perhaps, to think that their authors really did think about things in
a way that is very like the way we tend to think of them. I have now indicated a few
reasons why we should resist the charm of the familiar as we try to make sense of what
Plato has to say about knowledge and education. I do not believe that Plato intended to
explain these things in ways that would track our own commonplaces about them, nor
do I think the sophistication of contemporary epistemology will provide us with the
right tools to interpret Plato, since they are tools that are designed for a different pur-
pose than what Plato’s seems to have been. I will continue to defend these reservations
in much more detail in the following chapters of this book, so I hope that even readers
who remain unconvinced by the notes of caution I have sounded will be prepared to
look at the more detailed arguments that follow. Before going into the details of
what Plato actually does have to say about knowledge and education, however, it will
10 introduction
be useful to look at a couple of interpretive issues that arise in the earlier Books of the
Republic, before he offers the more detailed explanation of his epistemology in
Book V. But even in the earlier Books, I claim, there are plenty of anticipations of the
theory he ultimately provides.
I will begin, accordingly, with a preliminary review of Plato’s use of images in this
work, because I will eventually seek to explain the important ways in which the use of
images plays such a crucial role in Plato’s conception of education. I will then show
how two of the images that have generated considerable energy among scholars play a
role in the way Plato seeks to educate us, his readers, by their use. After my review of
these aspects of Plato’s most famous work, we can then turn to the specifics of what
Plato has to say about knowledge and education at a more theoretical level.
1.2 A Precis of the Argument of this Book

1.2.1 Plato’s book of images
These figures that they make and draw, of which shadows and reflections in water
are images, they now in turn use as images, in seeking to see those others themselves
that one cannot see except by means of thought.
(510e1–511a2)
Plato’s Republic is a book of images. Its most famous image, perhaps, is the image in which
he has Socrates compare all human beings to prisoners in a cave. But the Republic is
also the locus classicus of that most famous image of the ship of state, whose brave ruler
is compared to the ship’s captain (488a7–489c6; see also 389c4–d5). The book itself
begins with the somewhat spooky image reminiscent of the heroic katabasis or descent.3
And, indeed, considerably more imagery of various kinds can be found throughout
the Republic.4
There is, however, something at least a bit unnerving about all of this imagery. Plato’s
own most famous view of image-makers is notoriously negative:
[A]n imitator has neither knowledge nor right opinion about whether the things he makes are
fine or bad. [. . .] It seems, then, that we’re fairly well agreed that an imitator has no worthwhile
3 See Segal 1978: 330; Brann 1967; Rosenstock 1983.

4 See Bacon 1990; Berg 1906; Louis 1946; Mattei 1988; Patterson 1997; Tarrant 1946. An excellent and
extensive examination of Plato’s use of imagery may be found in A. Allen 2010. In brief, Allen argues that
“language itself is built out of images” (Allen 2010: 31), and thus affords a process of “coming to see the essen-
tial content of the virtues through attention to diverse concrete particulars” (Allen 2010: 32). Although I find
this somewhat overstated, since I will argue that Plato recommends the use of only certain kinds of images
(those he calls “summoners”) to arouse the power of knowledge in the production of thought (dianoia) but
not understanding (noēsis), it is not clear to me that he supposed that one could achieve a grasp of “the essen-
tial content of the virtues” via even the very best of philosophical writing. Even so, Allen does an admirable
job of describing sociological, psychological, educational, and cognitive values of images, with which I mostly
agree. One very recent work on Plato’s imagery (Frank 2018) distinguishes between using images for imita-
tion and using them for representation (Frank 2018: 36–41). Frank regards Plato’s representations as evidence
that Plato has purposefully portrayed Socrates as “in contradiction with himself ” throughout the work
(Frank 2018: 41). In what follows, I do not take Plato’s images to serve nearly as subversive a role as this!
a precis of the argument of this book 11
knowledge of the things he imitates, that imitation is a kind of game and not something to be
taken seriously . . . (602a8–9, b6–8)
Does Plato’s own condemnation of image-makers amount to a self-condemnation? In

Book V, the reader is warned that those who trade in images rather than the realities
they image may be likened to those who sleep and merely dream (476c2–8). Is it,
then, that Plato intended his Republic simply to lull us to sleep and false dreams, like
Descartes’s evil demon?
On the basis of worries such as those I have already expressed, some interpreters
have argued that we should understand the Republic as a kind of self-deconstructing
comedy,5 whose arguments and specific prescriptions should not be understood as
serious. This very radical understanding of the work, however, confounds the way the
work has been read since antiquity—Book II of Aristotle’s Politics, plainly, suggests that
if Plato had intended his Republic as a joke, his best student didn’t ‘get it.’ Throughout
most of the history of interpretation of this text, as far as we know of it,6 the Republic
has been understood as a serious work of political philosophy.7
In this book, I suggest a somewhat different way of understanding Plato’s greatest
work. In the view I propose, Plato’s work is intended neither as humor (though it is
sometimes funny) nor as a straightforward blueprint for political reform, but as an
educational work, whose educational methodology is best understood in the light of
the discussion of mathematical methodology that we find in the work itself. In brief,
the Republic presents the reader with a series of images that are not at all intended
in the imitative way Plato disparages in Book X, but to be used as images that provoke
thought, in much the same way as Plato describes the proper use of images in the
quotation with which I began this section.8
5 See Bloom 1968: 380–1; Clay 1988; Fendt 2014; Randall 1970: 167–70; Strauss 1964: 50–62. Most
recently, Frank 2018 offers a similar view of the Republic as contradicting many of what seem to be the
ideas Plato has Socrates present—though not for comedic purposes. Such interpretations have met with
heavy resistance. See, for examples, Klosko 1981: 365–89; Burnyeat 1985.
6 The Republic was, like most of Plato’s works, lost to the West until Medieval times. But if Averroes is
any indication, the early Muslims also did not regard the Republic as jest.
7 Not always as a political work we should admire, however. Plainly, the Republic is taken very seriously
as political philosophy in the famous polemical attack given in Popper 1966. For a more balanced, but still
very political take on the Republic, see Levinson’s reply to Popper (Levinson 1953).
8 Earlier discussions of Plato’s image-making include Paton 1921–22; Ringbom 1965: 95–6; and
Vernant 1975: 136, for examples. But none of these recognized Plato’s use of images as being consistent
with what he says about thought (dianoia) as an intermediate condition between belief (pistis) or opinion
(doxa) and understanding (noēsis), as I do in this book. To my knowledge, the first proposal of this kind of
approach may be found in M. Miller 1985. A more recent example of this same approach may be found in
D. Allen 2010. Belfiore 1984 sees differences in the terminology Plato uses to talk about images, in his criti-
cisms of imitators in Book X of the Republic, and the kinds of image-making he discusses in the other Books.
But Plato compares the philosopher-rulers to visual artists earlier in the Republic (at Rep. 500e2–501c3) in
a way that invites the sort of concern I address here, so I am disinclined to make too much of shifts in the
terminology of images from the earlier Books to Book X. Moss 2007 distinguishes bad imitation as (among
other things) imitating things that are themselves only images; good imitation imitates the forms. While
I agree that this is a good heuristic way to think of what can be good or bad about image-making, in
section 1.2.7, I show that Plato’s own images often do not directly imitate the forms, but only other, better
images of the forms. In some ways, my approach is compatible with that provided in Dorter 2006, though
12 introduction
1.2.2 The uses and abuses of images

As I said in the introduction to this chapter, Plato compares cognitive contact with
images with dreaming, and for the most part the comparison is not at all intended to be
favorable. But not all dreams are mere phantasms (see 599a2): In Book VII, he has
Socrates credit those engaged in mathematical studies with “dreaming about what is”
(533b8–c1), for although their reliance on assumptions and images prevents them
from achieving the “clear waking vision” of the forms only dialecticians can achieve,
their method does allow them to make some contact with the really real (533b6–7). In
fact, we sometimes find that Plato prefers to compare this use of images not to being
asleep and dreaming, but to the process of awakening from doxastic slumbers:
This, then, is what I was trying to express before, when I said that some things summon thought,
while others don’t. Those that strike the relevant sense at the same time as their opposites I call
summoners, those that don’t do this do not awaken understanding.
(524d1–4; see also 523d8–9)
Plato’s gripe with the imitators is not simply that they make images, then, for the
geometers also do this, and Plato regards the latter’s uses of images as extremely import-
ant in the process of education. The problem with the imitators is that their images do
not summon thought; instead, Plato complains, the imitators do nothing good them-
selves, for they neither know the form of the good nor even have correct belief, and
thus do not create images that are conducive to truth:
[The poets and other such] imitate images of virtue and all the other things they write about
and have no grasp of the truth. [. . .] We say that a maker of an image—an imitator—knows
nothing about that which is but only about its appearance. (600e4–6, 601b9–c1)
But why does the same argument not also apply to the geometers, who, we may sup-
pose, because of the defects of their methods relative to that of the dialectician, also do
not know what they imitate when they shape their images? More importantly, since
Plato puts all of these words into the mouth of Socrates, who repeats his well-known
disclaimer of knowledge in several places in the dialogue (see, e.g. at 368b4–5, 506c2–3),
why does the same criticism not also apply to Socrates himself?
It might be tempting to answer these questions by talking about the different
motivations of the geometers and Socrates, on the one hand, and the poets or visual
artists whose work Plato deplores. The former, it might be insisted, are at least seekers
in his view Plato’s use of images goes from oversimplification to greater nuance throughout the Republic
(see Dorter 2006: 1 and 369 for clear statements of his understanding). In the view I present, the nuances
are informative, but they are also mindful of—and are often intended to reveal—the flaws and limitations
of the images themselves. I also do not accept that Plato’s intent, in calling our attention to such flaws, is to
undercut the thrust of the overall argument. Dorter, for example, thinks that such complications should
lead to the result that “Socrates’s audience was right to think that the concept of philosopher-rulers is
absurd after all” (Dorter 2006: 166).
after truth, whereas the latter seek only to flatter and to gratify their audience. Plato
certainly has Socrates make this claim (“his appeal is to the inferior part of the soul”—
605a10–b1), but it is not one of Plato’s most impressive arguments. After all, as defenders
of literature and the arts always insist when they read this critique, why must we sup-
pose that one simply cannot create visual or literary art that aims at revealing (however
imagistically) some semblance of the truth?
Happily, however, the motivational argument does not provide Plato’s only grounds
for distinguishing the imitators he deplores from the image-makers he praises—
including, especially, the one whose image he creates as the main speaker of the
Republic itself. But to see this more clearly, we must look more closely at the epistemic
condition Plato assigns to the mathematicians.
1.2.3 Mathematicians and knowledge

The problem we encountered in the last section was that Plato criticizes the imitators
as engaging in image-making without knowledge. And yet, it would appear that the
same objection can be made against those whose creation of images Plato seems to
endorse. In this section, however, I deny the appropriateness of this comparison. The
imitators, I claim, do what they do without knowledge, whereas the mathematicians
(and Socrates) do what they do with knowledge. I recognize that in saying this, I appear
to contradict the very passages in which Plato has Socrates compare the cognitive
states of the mathematicians unfavorably with the dialecticians, on the one hand, and
also those in which Socrates himself disclaims knowledge, on the other. So in order to
secure my claim, I must explain how my reading actually does not violate the sense of
these texts.
As I indicated in section 1.1, given the way contemporary philosophers approach
epistemology, it might seem as if the only question we must settle is whether or not the
mathematicians generate justified true beliefs in regard to the subjects they pursue, by
their use of images, or perhaps alternatively, whether their use of images is conditioned
upon or derives from such cognitive states. But just to put the question this way already
creates a difficulty for the Plato scholar, for the epistemology of the Republic, especially
as it is most carefully articulated in Book V, makes it plain that unlike contemporary
epistemologists, Plato does not provide an analysis of knowledge as a species of belief.
In contemporary epistemology, knowledge is generally treated as a species of belief, of
course—as justified or warranted true belief. Justification or warrant, we are often
told, is that additional feature of knowledge that is lacking in other sorts of true
belief.9 But in Plato’s account in the Republic, not only is knowledge not some special
kind of belief, it is, in fact, not any kind of belief at all, but is instead an entirely differ-
ent cognitive power. So if we are going to make much headway in discovering how
9 For a particularly clear statement of this sort, see Plantinga 1993: vi.
14 introduction
Plato makes assessments of knowledge, we are going to need to set aside our modern
epistemological presuppositions.
Plato introduces his notion of cognitive powers by likening them to our sensory
capacities, such as sight and hearing. Such powers, he says are to be distinguished by
what they are naturally related to as object, and by what they produce from their activity.
Knowledge (epistēmē), Plato argues, is a distinct cognitive power from opinion (doxa),
because knowledge is naturally related to what is, whereas opinion is naturally related
to particular sensible things.
Plato’s epistemic complaint about the imitators—and his qualified epistemic
approval of the mathematicians—must be understood in the light of his conception of
the cognitive powers. Notice how the dreamer is distinguished from the non-dreamer
in Book V:
What about someone who recognizes10 beautiful things, but doesn’t believe in the beautiful
itself and isn’t able to follow anyone who could lead him to the knowledge of it? Don’t you think
he is living in a dream rather than a wakened state? Isn’t this dreaming, whether asleep or
awake, to think that a likeness is not a likeness but rather the thing itself that it is like?
I certainly think that someone who does that is dreaming.
But someone who, to take the opposite case, recognizes the beautiful itself, can see both it
and the things that participate in it and doesn’t acknowledge that the participants are it or that
it itself is the participants—is he living in a dream or is he awake?
He’s very much awake. (476c1–d3)
The distinction Plato has Socrates make is not made between those who recognize only
images and those who recognize only their originals; rather, the difference between the
believer and the knower is that the knower recognizes both sorts of entities, whereas
the believer recognizes only images. One who understands that images actually are
only images of higher realities, employs images in a way that engages the cognitive power
of knowledge, rather than mere opinion. Precisely because this use of images charac-
terizes the mathematician, I count the distinction in Book V between the dreamer and
the non-dreamer as support for my earlier claim that the mathematicians use images
with knowledge. Their cognitive disadvantage relative to the dialecticians must not,
accordingly, be understood as the disadvantage of those who do not engage the power
of knowledge, relative to those who do. I will offer a more detailed analysis of Plato’s
understanding of knowledge and belief as powers in Chapter 3.
10 I have amended the translation from what is given in Cooper 1997 here, which has the word I have
translated as ‘recognizes’ as ‘believes in.’ The Greek verb is ‘nomizōn’ which should not be confused for the
words Plato uses for ‘belief ’ (pistis or doxa) or ‘opinion’ (doxa). Rather, ‘nomizōn’ should be taken to mean
‘recognizes’ or ‘acknowledges,’ and so that is how I have rendered it here and in the rest of this passage. So
when Plato distinguishes those who have and use the cognitive power of knowledge as ‘believing in the
beautiful itself,’ he is not implying that knowledge is, after all, a species of belief in the way that contemporary
epistemology has it.
The actual disadvantage between these two groups is explored and described in the
famous divided line passage of Book VI. The proper interpretation of this passage is
controversial, and I will have a great deal more to say about it in Chapter 5, but for now
it will suffice to consider the way in which Plato characterizes the relationship between
the top two subsections of the line and the lower two. After first dividing the line into
two unequal segments, and then subdividing each segment in the same proportion as
the segments of original division, Socrates then associates the lowest subsection with
shadows and reflections, and the subsection above that one with the originals of these
images. He then offers his first explanation of the significance of the image/original
relation between these two subsections:
Would you be willing to say that, as regards truth and untruth, the division is in this proportion:
As the opinable is to the knowable, so the likeness is to the thing that it is like? (510a8–10)
Now, the relationship between the opinables and the knowables Plato makes in this
passage, which is said to correspond to the relationship between the images and
originals in the two lower subsections of the line, can only refer to the contents of the
entire lower main segment (both of the two lowest subsections, that is), and those of the
entire upper segment (both subsections), respectively. ‘Opinables’ (identified in Book V
with the sensibles) do not belong (under this description, at any rate) above the main
division of the line, initially said to divide the intelligible from the sensible domains.
Hence the ‘opinable/knowable’ distinction cannot be a way to characterize the rela-
tionship between the lower and upper subsections of the upper segment of the line.
Similarly, Plato should not be understood as comparing one of the lower with one of
the upper subsections of the line, for he has yet to explicate anything about either of the
upper subsections. The ‘opinable/knowable’ distinction, accordingly, must be under-
stood as a way to characterize the first proportion of the two main segments of the line,
which the proportion between the two lowest subsections, which Socrates had just
explained, is supposed to replicate.
If I am right about what the ‘opinable/knowable’ distinction is supposed to show,
however, it follows that even though the mathematicians are contrasted negatively
with the dialecticians, they are included from the very beginning of the line simile in
the section associated with the ‘knowables.’ So on this ground, too, it seems clear enough
that Plato regards the mathematicians as employing the cognitive power of knowledge
(the power naturally related to the ‘knowables’). There may be some cognitive defi-
ciency in such studies, accordingly, but that deficiency is not to be characterized as a
lack of—so much as a deficient employment of—knowledge.
What, then, is the deficiency of mathematical method, relative to the dialectical
method? Plato answers this question explicitly, and the explanation does not deny the
possession or use of the power of knowledge to the mathematicians. Instead, their
deficiency, relative to the dialecticians, is just that they continue to rely on the use of
images, of which the dialecticians have no further need, and they also continue to rely
16 introduction
on hypothesized entities for which they can offer no overarching explanation, whereas
the dialecticians can explain all of their earlier hypotheses in the light of the “unhy-
pothesized starting point of all,” which is generally understood as the form of the good.11
1.2.4 Socrates as image-maker

If this argument is correct, there is a use of images that employs the cognitive power of
knowledge: the use in which images are created and employed that recognizes them as
mere images, and where their proper use is designed to allow the thinker who uses
them to gain a better grasp of the originals they image. It is this use, then, that Plato has
Socrates associate with the mathematicians.
But what about the many images that Plato has Socrates evoke? Are Socrates’ images
introduced as images of higher things . . . and are they employed in such a way as to
expedite achieving a better grasp of those higher things? I doubt that it requires
much argument to establish an affirmative answer to this question. I assume it will be
more than adequate simply to remind ourselves of the way that Socrates goes about
answering the challenges with which he is confronted in Book II. Insisting that the
discussion of Book I was a “glutton’s feast” (see 354b1–3) because the discussants had
not troubled to obtain a clear conception of justice before taking on the subsidiary
question of its preferability to injustice, Socrates elects in Book II to postpone the actual
defense of justice until a suitable conception of justice can be obtained (see 369a5–b2).
The way in which Socrates proposes to approach the prior question, in this case, is by
way of the image of large and small letters. This image turns out to be an image of a
relationship between image and original: the larger letters are used as an image of the
smaller; so too the state will be used, in the discussants’ search for a workable concep-
tion of justice, as an image of the individual person (see 368e7–369a2). And a given
individual’s instantiation of justice, we find out soon after this, is itself but an image of
the form (445c5–6, 479e1–2). So the construction of the main argument of the Republic
(and plainly, the most famous images of light in the middle books) give clear instances
of a use of images that has the same general feature that characterizes the use of images
within the mathematical studies: These images were explicitly identified as images,
and were used in order to gain better grasps of higher things. This use of images, recall,
employs the cognitive power of knowledge, even though it does not yield the same
degree of clarity as one capable of dialectic could achieve. Plato’s Socrates is not doing
mathematics, of course; but he is using images in a way that engages knowledge.12
11 I believe my claim is accurate, but, as always in Platonic scholarship, there is dissent. For an example
of such dissent, see Sayre 1995: 173–81 and Nails 2013.
12 Since I find this use of images throughout the Republic, and not just in the section from 474c to 497c,
I obviously disagree with Dorter, who thinks the dialogue transitions through all of the levels of the divided
line (Dorter 2006: esp. 149–81). My own view is similar to the one given by Fine (in Fine 1999: 236), and
also by Morgan, who explains that “It is not just that images are intended to capture the imagination of the
non-philosophical multitude, but that imagery used correctly can point beyond itself to something deeper
(or higher)” (Morgan 2017: 196–7, citing also Gonzalez 1998: 129–49 and Patterson 1997: 343–7). Long
claims that when Plato uses images “his immediate aim is not always to understand Forms” (Long 2017: 158),
But why, then, does Socrates disclaim knowledge, if I am right in claiming that the
way in which he constructs his arguments employs it? The answer to this question,
I contend, may be found in the same distinction as we find Socrates making between
the mathematicians, who employ the cognitive power of knowledge, but whose method
fails to realize the most significant effects of that power, because of its reliance on
images and on unexplained hypotheses. Let us see exactly how Socrates characterizes
his own epistemic condition. At 506b2, Glaucon and Socrates have reached an agreement
that the rulers of the city they are imagining must know the Good. But now Glaucon
presses Socrates to give his own view of what the Good is, but Socrates demurs:
What? Do you think it’s right to talk about things one doesn’t know as if one does know them?
Not as if one knows them, he said, but one ought to be willing to state one’s opinions as such.
What? Haven’t you noticed that opinions without knowledge are shameful and ugly things?
The best of them are blind—or do you think that those who express a true opinion without
intelligence13 are any different from blind people who happen to travel the right road?
They’re no different.
Do you want to look at shameful, blind, and crooked things, then, when you might hear
illuminating and fine ones from other people? (506c2–12)
But, of course, Socrates is presenting Glaucon with a false alternative, and the young
man seems to sense as much, for despite Socrates’ very negative characterization of the
products of mere opinion, Glaucon urges Socrates nonetheless to continue his discus-
sion “as you discussed justice, moderation, and the rest” (506d2–4). Glaucon, in other
words, is not merely asking Socrates for his opinion; Glaucon takes Socrates all along
not to have been stating “opinions without knowledge,” while also accepting that
Socrates has not been speaking as one who knows or even as proposing “a true opinion
without intelligence.” Glaucon takes Socrates to be somewhere between these two
conditions, and because Socrates responds to Glaucon’s plea by continuing (with the
image of the Sun), we may assume that Socrates also regards himself as not merely serv-
ing up opinions that are “shameful, blind, and crooked.” His own epistemic condition,
then, is one in which the power of knowledge has been engaged, but—as he employs
images and makes assumptions in his attempt to gain a better grasp of truth—his own
use of the power of knowledge does not produce in him (or, presumably, in those who
listen to him) the condition that would be produced by the power of k nowledge when
fully realized (which, we discover at the end of Book VI, he calls “understanding”—
noēsis). In this passage, then, we find Socrates and Glaucon acknowledging the limita-
tions of their method of inquiry, while continuing to insist that it is not a method that
leaves them simply blind, or only lucky to happen upon the right path.
and suggests that the image of the “ship of state” (488a8–489a6) is an example of an image that is not
intended to help us to understand a form. I am not convinced that Plato does not intend to help us to under-
stand any form via this image, but a more detailed treatment of the image than I wish to provide herein
would be required to make the case for my dissent from Long on this point.
13 Translation modified from the one given in Cooper 1997; the Greek word used here is the one that
translation normally gives as “intelligence.”
18 introduction
1.2.5 Plato as image-maker

Plato creates images in words.14 As with other images, images in words are representa-
tions of how things are that to some extent and at the same time do and also do not get
the reality they represent accurately. By now, it will come as no surprise that I intend to
claim that Plato’s own use of images also reveals the same general method as he attributes
to the mathematicians and as he portrays Socrates as employing with his interlocutors.
Plato’s own use of images, however, begins even before the use Plato gives to Socrates,
for as I mentioned at the beginning of this essay, from the opening pages of the Republic
the reader is bombarded with images. It is worth noticing that Plato’s first images are
not limited to the heroic katabasis imagery I mentioned earlier, however. As soon as
the topic of justice is introduced, Plato offers a series of images of the conception of
justice he will have Socrates defend later in the Republic.
Plato first has Cephalus characterize justice as consisting in telling the truth and
paying back debts. Although this characterization is plainly inadequate, as Socrates
quickly shows, its likeness to the conception Plato later defends—according to which a
kallipolis will be ruled by truth-loving philosopher-rulers (see 382a4–c2), whose psychic
harmony would make them the least likely to fail to repay a debt (442e4–443a1). After
Polemarchus ‘inherits’ the discussion from his father, he attempts to characterize justice
as helping friends and harming enemies. Socrates soon reveals the inadequacies of this
account, though later we may recall how it resembles Socrates’ own conception, accord-
ing to which everyone in the state is a friend to everyone else, whose happiness is to be
maximized without unfair or special advantage to anyone (420b4–8, 465e5–466a6),
and in which all Greeks should regard one another as friends, reserving the most
devastating acts of war for use only against non-Greeks (469b5–471c2)—those who
are “natural enemies” to the Greeks (470c6). These same later prescriptions allow us to
recall their likeness in Polemarchus’s revision of his view, according to which we must
help all good people and harm only the bad ones. And when Thrasymachus comes in,
we are told that justice is the advantage of the stronger—a claim that remains true in
Socrates’ own account, for the reasons I have just stated, except that unlike Thrasymachus,
Socrates does not regard the advantage, once justice is correctly understood, as belong-
ing exclusively to the stronger, for it goes to everyone, strong and weak, in the kallipolis.
Only Thrasymachus’s claim that injustice is more advantageous than justice fails to
provide a likeness of Socrates’ later hypotheses.
So we also find that Plato uses images, whose inadequacies are noted, so that we
can move from them to those better conceptions, of which the former turn out to
be mere images. These, too, come to be revealed as but images, as we climb Plato’s
ladder of images so as to approach those realities that are originals only, and not
themselves images. But the Republic never takes us entirely to this point—it is, instead,
a book of images.
14 For which, see D. Allen 2010: esp. chapter 2.

This understanding of the Republic has important consequences for how we are to
understand not only Plato’s methodology in presenting his ideas to his readers, but
also for what we should conceive as his overall purpose for the work. As I noted at the
outset, two of the most widely shared conceptions of the Republic either dismiss its
seriousness altogether, or else take its recommendations quite literally as doctrine to
be followed in political practice. In the view I have presented, neither of these concep-
tions is correct. The non-serious reading of the Republic may be credited at least on
some issues with noticing that Plato’s images are disturbingly flawed. Far from showing
that Plato was not serious about his images, however, we can now see that such flaws
are inherent to images, and that the kind of critique of these images we get from such
scholars (and later, in Aristotle’s own critique) is actually an essential part of the correct
use of images—for it is only because such images present both the characteristic they
are intended to present (such as justice) and the opposite characteristic that they serve
well to “awaken understanding” as the kind of provocative images this method requires
(523b9–524d4). In the rest of this book, I will be looking very closely at several of
Plato’s most famous images, and will try to show how Plato allows (or actively encour-
ages) his readers to see that they all have the sorts of flaws that allow them to serve as
‘summoners’ of the power of knowledge. That role requires their flaws to be recognizable;
but such flaws do not at all mean that the presentation of the images are mere play or
humor, for the project of using images to move to their original is entirely a serious
one—one that is fundamental to the kind of education that is needed to engage, focus,
and strengthen the cognitive power of knowledge that is within us.
The flaw in the traditional style of interpretation of the Republic15 is one that is equal
but the opposite of the one that infects the non-serious view. For as a book of images,
Plato certainly did not intend us to take those images in the sort of wooden or literal
way that would harden their contours into moral or political dogma. The images of
justice Plato presents, I claim, are intended to serve as methodological ‘summoners,’
whose proper use takes them seriously as images, which is to say as provocatively flawed
approximations of our real intellectual goals, rather than as flawless guides to action in
and of themselves. The failure of the traditional interpretation of the Republic is that it
takes Plato’s images too seriously: Like Plato’s mere dreamers, traditionalists mistake
the likeness for what it is like.
In my view, readers of the Republic are supposed to find it, and all of its contents,
provocative. It is intended to stimulate thought—to raise questions much more than
to settle any of them. Plato offers us something like a vast ‘thought-experiment,’ with
the aid of many images, which we are to take seriously, but not so seriously that we
forget the distortion inherent to them, we are drawn up towards those realities access-
ible only in thought, and we are drawn down from our hypotheses to conclusions that
15 To give just one distinguished example of this sort of approach, in her book on the Republic Julia
Annas characterizes it in this way: “It gives us systematic answers to a whole range of questions about morality,
politics, knowledge, and metaphysics” (Annas 1981: 1).
20 introduction
often trouble us and provoke us into further dispute. That Plato’s book of images
has impressively succeeded as a ‘summoning’ knowledge in such a way as to produce
thought (again, dianoia) is amply demonstrated by the extent to which we continue to
debate its meaning—and its merits—even today.
1.2.6 Images of images of images and more

I will close this chapter with a cautionary note, the gist of which is that things are not
as simple as I will typically try to make them seem in this book. The problem in decoding
images comes when we try to get clear on what is an image of what in Plato’s book
of images. I will offer a much more detailed interpretation of Plato’s famous divided
line image later (in Chapter 5), but for now, it seems as if we can identify at least three
layers of images within that single image. Let us call these three ‘grades’ of reality, in
descending order:
Level 1 (the highest grade of reality): Plato’s forms
Level 2: Particular sensible things
Level 3: Shadows and reflections of particular sensible things
The objects of level 3 are images of the objects of level 2, which in turn are images of the
objects at level 1. So far, so good.
Plato immediately goes on to attach onto the imagery of the divided line his most
famous image of all, the story of the cave (which I will discuss in more detail in
Chapter 6). In this image, we find prisoners looking at shadows on a cave wall, which
are caused by puppets or statues carried along a pathway behind the prisoners and in
front of a fire. The prisoner is then released from bondage, spun to look at the puppets
or statues (but blinded by the light of the fire), then dragged to the mouth of the cave,
and—at first blinded by the sun—can manage only to look at shadows and reflections
(level 3), and only after a period of habituation, able to see the visible originals of
these shadows and reflections (level 2). So, it looks like Plato has now included some
more images whose status we will have to classify:
1. Puppets/statues and fire in the cave
2. Shadows of puppets on the cave wall.
So let us take stock of the layers of images Plato has provided in the divided line and
cave passages. Plato tells us that the puppets/statues are images of “people and other
animals” (514c1–515a1), which seem to belong to the group of visible things we earlier
identified as level 2. That would put the puppets/statues, as images of the things belong-
ing to level 2, into the category of level 3—the same degree of reality as the shadows
and reflections outside the cave. There may be some interesting interpretive issues as to
why Plato has included in the puppets/statues a group of artificial images (as opposed
to the naturally occurring shadows and reflections), but one obvious advantage of his
doing so is that they are the right sorts of objects to allow shadows of themselves to be
cast on the cave wall in the firelight. These shadows on the cave wall, then, would count
as yet another layer of reality—a level 4.
Now Plato is very clear that he regards each new degree of reality to be a d
egradation,
relative to the one above it. As I have already mentioned, in Book V (in yet another
associated bit of imagery!), he compares the degree of degradation, between cognitive
contact with the forms and cognitive contact with particular visible things, as being
like the difference between waking and dreaming, respectively (476c1–d5). One who
conceives only in terms of third-degree reality, then, would be in a state comparable to
whatever might be called a ‘dream of a dream.’ And the poor cave-dwellers are dreaming
of dreaming of dreaming. So it is fair to say that the way in which Plato assigns cogni-
tive value and reliability to these different levels is one that places extreme disvalue on
the cognitive conditions of those who belong to the levels of the cavemen.
To what degree of reality, then, should we assign Plato’s own text? The image of the
cave is articulated by Plato’s own image of the philosopher, Socrates, whose supposedly
spoken words are recorded in the Republic. So Plato’s own descriptions of the shadows
on the cave wall are not the shadows themselves, but are verbal images of such shadows,
given in a written image of a supposedly original spoken word. But that means that, if
Socrates’ spoken words are images (in speech) of the shadows on the cave wall, then
Socrates’ words must be level 5 realities. And it gets worse: Plato’s written words are
images of Socrates’ putatively spoken words. But wait: let us remind ourselves of the
further fact that the words Socrates is represented as speaking are actually also
framed, not as they were originally spoken, but as narrated from memory, by Socrates,
of a conversation he already had the day before (see 327a1 ff.). Would this make his
memories of the conversation a memory-image? And what about us—do we receive
the meaning of the text directly, or do we generate within our own minds an image of
what the text means?
I think the point—and the troubling paradox it brings to light—is clear enough,
even if we have lost track of what depths of confusion in images we have reached by
now. Plato has his character Socrates show disdain and mistrust for images—but also
buries his readers in so many layers of imagery that we risk losing contact with what is
really real. Even if we attempt to talk about the forms, we must do so in the imagery of
language. But Plato is not content to leave us even that close to what he counts as really
real. Instead he pushes us down into a cave, and cheerfully declares that his prisoners
are “like us” (515a5), but does not actually even give us a fourth-degree purchase on his
subject, as he writes about a speech recalled by a character who talks about prisoners in
a cave . . . looking at level 4 realities!
So the question for those of us who wish to understand Plato is this: Why would
Plato go to such great lengths to push us, his own readers, into what would seem to be
absurdly disadvantaged positions, relative to the very things his work is supposed to
reveal to us? Plato’s images and narrative frames are most certainly important parts
of his works. And there is good reason to think that Plato chooses each image very
22 introduction
carefully to serve in whatever his pedagogical program might be for the work in which
that image appears. But as the examples I have just explored also show, Plato’s careful
uses of images and framing also seem intended at times to call our attention to the
extraordinarily deficient position in which we happen to find ourselves, when we read
his works and fancy that we might come to understand them and their subjects.
Socrates himself is famous for declaring his awareness of his own ignorance. One thing
Plato may be doing, then, by throwing at his readers layer after layer of distance from
our intended target of understanding, is trying to induce in us the same epistemic
humility that was, perhaps, the basis for everything else we get from Socrates in the
pages of Plato.
But perhaps there is also a more hopeful idea we could derive from this exercise in
our imagination. Plato identifies thought (dianoia) as the cognitive condition of trying
to conceive of reality (level 1 reality) through the (judicious) use of images. I suggest—
though I obviously can’t prove this—that Plato did not think that the only way one can
go about this procedure is only to use level 2 realities in our search. Rather, Plato pro-
vokes us with multiple levels of imaging, but also reminds us to ‘keep our eyes on the
prize’ as we pursue our own education. The most important advantage one can ever
achieve when using an image is to recognize what one is using as an image. Plato’s most
famous work, the Republic, reminds us of this persistently. But it does more than remind
us; it reveals its own nature as a summoner to awaken the power of knowledge within
us, and to recognize that all of the many images in our world—including the Republic’s
own complicated nest of them—are useful as images if we can just keep track of what is
being imaged. In the remainder of this book, then, I will at least attempt to indicate
where and how one thing Plato shows us is intended to be an image of something else.
When possible, we may need to remind ourselves as we go along just where in the
many levels of reality our own discussion happens to be.
2
Images of Justice
2.1 Conceiving Justice through Images

2.1.1 Introduction
In this chapter, I review two of Plato’s uses of images of justice—perhaps two of the most
important and puzzling examples. The first example I explore is Plato’s analogy of soul
and state. My argument in the section dedicated to this particular pair of images—
both, I claim, images of justice—is that for all its power and importance to the entire
defense of justice in the Republic, these images that Plato presents and compares to
each other are also revealed by Plato to be flawed in important ways. Even so, they
invite the reader to try to achieve a clearer conception of justice by working through
these images, seeing that they are quite good as images of justice, while also being
reminded occasionally about their limitations as images. To give the gist of my argu-
ment, Plato creates images of justice in both the ‘fine city’ (kallipolis) and in the tripar-
tite picture of the soul, but also gives several indications that we should not suppose the
images he provides in either are without flaws. Instead, Plato carefully gives indica-
tions that the kallipolis he envisioned in the Republic, while certainly rightly character-
ized as just, is actually not an ideal, has within it not just the root causes of injustice,
but also requires legal structures to deal with injustices that will arise within it. As far as
the just soul, I will argue that the way in which it is depicted involves reasoning that
Plato also suggests he is not entirely committed to, even though it succeeds quite well
in giving us an image of how a soul might be or become just.
The second part of this chapter involves one of the most controversial and often
vilified aspects of Plato’s proposed political program in the kallipolis: his claim that the
rulers must on the one hand be completely dedicated lovers of truth, but must also
sometimes lie to those over whom they rule, and in at least one case, themselves accept
one of the untruths Plato has Socrates advocate. I will argue that conceiving the actions
of Plato’s rulers in terms of their role in creating images—images, again, that fall short
of what Plato regards as the real truth—is critical to Plato’s defense of their uses and
acceptances of certain falsehoods.
So this will be a chapter dedicated to a couple of the most important examples of
Plato’s using and calling our attention to the role of images in our attempts to conceive
of justice. For the purposes of this book, these two examples will then serve to prepare
24 images of justice
us to see the same kinds of thinking through images that play such a crucial role in
Plato’s discussion of knowledge and education in the middle books of the Republic.
2.2 Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State

2.2.1 Introduction to the analogy
At the beginning of Book II of Plato’s Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus express
dissatisfaction with Socrates’ refutation of Thrasymachus, and challenge him to offer a
more persuasive proof that justice is preferable to injustice. But at the end of Book I,
Socrates compared the conversation with which Glaucon and Adeimantus are so
unimpressed to a feast of gluttons, where the rude diners attempt to devour each new
dish before properly enjoying the preceding one (354b1–3). To have conducted the
inquiry properly, Socrates proclaimed at the end of Book I, would have been to dis-
cern first what justice is before turning to the next ‘dish’ and attempting to discern
whether it is preferable to injustice or not.
In giving his reply to the renewed Thrasymachean challenge mounted by Plato’s
brothers, then, Socrates ensures that there will be a proper ‘feast’ by turning first to the
question of what justice is, before any attempt is made to decide whether justice or
injustice is preferable. Famously (or notoriously), to accomplish this goal, Socrates
proposes the analogy of large and small letters (368c8–d7), in which those with poor
eyesight are given the opportunity to read the same message in large letters, before
attempting to discern it written in small letters. This situation, in turn, is compared
to the attempt Socrates proposes, to “see” justice first in a state, where it will be “writ
large,” before trying to figure out what it is “in smaller letters” in a soul.
Plato’s Socrates and his interlocutors accept from the outset and without argument
that justice in the state and soul are like the same letters inscribed in a large and a
small format, and this assumption has been widely challenged and questioned by
Plato’s critics.1 In this section, I will neither object to this assumption nor defend it,
but instead will show that the specific way in which Plato articulates his analogy is
irreparably logically flawed.2 Specifically, I will argue in the next section that the argu-
ments Plato offers for the tripartition of the soul are founded upon an equivocation,
1 For examples, according to Sachs 1963 and Vlastos 1981a, Plato equivocates on the conception of
justice, though they offer different accounts of the equivocation and come to different conclusions about
how serious such equivocations are to Plato’s overall argument. I provide my own response to Sachs’s objec-
tions in Chapter 6. A recent discussion of Plato’s analogy, with extensive citations of the different views
scholars have proposed about it, may be found in Thaler 2017.
2 Other criticisms of Plato’s psychology in the Republic may be found in the literature, as well as attempts
to defend it. For example, Bobonich 1994 and Irwin 1995: 217–22 argue that Plato’s conception of the
parts of the soul mistakenly attributes to them a kind of agency which belongs properly only to the indi-
vidual of which they are parts. In this chapter, I do not address such concerns directly, but I would note that
insofar as my arguments give some reason to think that Plato was not wholly committed to his partitioning
arguments, he cannot either be regarded as wholly committed to the sorts of errors Bobonich and Irwin
have identified.
Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State 25
and that each of the valid options by which Plato might remove the equivocation will
not produce a tripartite soul.3 The result of this argument, plainly, is that the way in
which Plato actually makes the analogy of state and soul—by appealing to the similarities
between a tripartite state of rulers, soldiers, and craftsmen, in the kallipolis, to a
tripartite soul of reason, high spirit (or thumos), and appetite—cannot validly be made.
(In the remainder of this chapter, I will call this specification of the soul–state analogy
the ‘3–3 specification.’) In the second part of my argument, however, I will argue that
Plato reveals a lack of full commitment to the 3–3 specification of the analogy with-
out thereby calling the analogy itself into question. If this is so, then it follows that
the heart of the analogy is not to be found in the comparison of the kallipolis and its
three parts to the soul conceived as tripartite, but rather must be supposed to reside
in some other connection between the ways in which justice characterizes states
and souls; and I will suggest what this other connection consists in. I will conclude by
showing that the failure of Plato’s psychological arguments that I find in section 2.1.2,
which is fatal to the 3–3 specification of the analogy, is not fatal to the analogy itself, or
even to the political aspects of Plato’s Republic, even if it would require that substantial
changes be made in Plato’s psychological theory. But most importantly for my pur-
poses in this book, I will show that the flaws in Plato’s analogy are entirely compatible
with Plato’s conception of how images can be useful, in spite of the fact that they are
invariably flawed.
2.2.2 Plato’s arguments for psychic division

At 434b8–c11, Socrates and Glaucon agree that they have discovered what justice is in
the city:
Meddling and exchange between these three classes, then, is the greatest harm that can
happen to the city and would rightly be called the worst thing someone could do to it.
Exactly.
And wouldn’t you say that the worst thing that someone could do to his city is
injustice?
Of course.
Then, that exchange and meddling is injustice. Or to put it the other way around: For
the money-making, auxiliary, and guardian classes each to do its own work in the
city, is the opposite. That’s justice, isn’t it, and makes the city just?
I agree. Justice is that and nothing else.
3 As one might expect, there have been numerous scholarly proposals on precisely how we are to under-
stand what Plato says about the construction of the soul in this and other dialogues in the vast scholarly
literature on Plato’s psychology. Good places to find citations to this literature include Wagner 2001;
Lorenz 2006; Ferrari 2007b; Barney, Brennan, and Brittain 2012; and Kamtekar 2018. Given the nature of
my project here, I cannot directly address or incorporate all of the scholarly arguments in these and other
works or the issues they raise.
The conception of justice expressed in this passage links it directly to the tripartite
class structure of the kallipolis, and so it is not surprising that when Plato’s Socrates
goes on to consider what justice is in the soul, we find him immediately looking for
three parts of the soul to correspond to these three classes in the kallipolis.
Then a just man won’t differ at all from a just city in respect to the form of justice;
rather, he’ll be like the city.
He will.
But a city was thought to be just when each of the three natural classes within it did
its own work, and it was thought to be moderate, courageous, and wise because of
certain other conditions and states of theirs.
That’s true.
Then, if an individual has these same three parts in the soul, we will expect him to be
correctly called by the same names as the city if he has the same conditions in them.
Necessarily so. (435b1–c3)
The general principle, which Socrates employs in each of the partitioning arguments,
is announced at 436b9–c2:
It is obvious that the same thing will not be willing to do or undergo opposites in the same part
of itself, in relation to the same thing, at the same time. So, if we ever find this happening in the
soul, we’ll know that we aren’t dealing with one thing but many.
Socrates immediately goes on to introduce a paradigm case for the application of this
principle: the same thing at the same time in the same part of itself cannot both be
at rest and also move (436c6–7). From the way in which he articulates the principle,
and immediately clarifies his meaning with this example, we might well understand
Socrates as committing himself to nothing more controversial than a principle of
non-contradiction:
(X) The same simple object cannot at the same time and with regard to the same
things perform contradictory actions or undergo contradictory changes.
This interpretation of the principle is especially inviting if we construe moving and
resting as contradictories—that is, where either ‘resting’ just is ‘not moving’ or ‘mov-
ing’ just is ‘not-resting.’ But Socrates actually states his principle in a way that invites an
alternative understanding, by stipulating that it is not opposite actions or modifications
that a thing cannot do or undergo, where by ‘opposite,’ we do not mean ‘contradictory.’
Pushing and pulling, for example, are not contradictories, but opposites, and this may
be the sort of model that Plato has in mind.4
4 See F. Miller 1999 for emphasis on this option. One who seems to think that Plato really does under-
stand his partitioning principle in terms of contradictories is Brown 2012: 58–62, who cites Plato’s use of
this principle in the case of moving and not moving against what he calls the “standard reading,” and cites
Irwin 1995: 204; Price 1995: 40–1; and Shields 2001: 145 as examples of those who advance the “standard
Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State 27
(O) The same simple object cannot at the same time and with regard to the same
things perform opposing actions or undergo opposing changes.
Evidence that (O) and not (X) should be our interpretation of the partitioning p rinciple
may be seen from Socrates’ subsequent list of examples of the sorts of ‘opposites’ that
he has in mind: “assent and dissent, desiring to have something and rejecting it, draw-
ing in and thrusting away” (437b1–4). This list, however, requires interpretation, as
we shall soon see.
The problem comes when Plato seeks to apply his partitioning principle to the
specific cases he gives to divide the soul, for the relevant cases either do not appear to
fall under the above interpretations of the principle—or, if they do, the principle will
turn out to do considerably more than Plato seems to want it to do. To see that this is
so, let us begin by reviewing Plato’s first partitioning argument, which is intended to
show that the soul may be divided into at least two parts: reason and appetite.
At 439a1–d8, Plato considers the case of someone who is thirsty, but refuses to drink.
But this would be a case to which we could apply (X) only if it would be true to say of
the person both that she did and also that she did not wish to drink. As tempting as it
might be to say this about her, it would not be true, however. We often do describe
our negative or aversive desires in this way: ‘I do not want to drink,’ but it is important
to distinguish between cases in which we wish to proclaim a lack of a certain desire
(which would be the contradictory of having the relevant desire) and cases in which we
have a negative desire, or an aversion to something, for example, where we have a very
real desire not to drink. Non-sentient entities lack any desire of any sort; so it is true to
say of a thumbtack, for example, that it does not want to drink. It is most certainly not
true, however (assuming my assessment of thumbtacks as non-sentients is correct, of
course), ever to say that a thumbtack wants not to drink. Thumbtacks lack desires, but
never have aversions.
What appears to be happening in Plato’s case of someone who is thirsty but refuses
to drink, then, does not fall under principle (X) because it does not identify a case in
which the person both has and lacks the relevant desire. Instead, the person seems to
have two desires, which appear to oppose one another. Accordingly, it would appear
that (O) is a more likely rule to apply in this case.5
One of the most notable—and perhaps also most troublesome—aspects of psycho-
logical states is their ‘intensionality.’ The objects to which such states refer, it is often
said, are given ‘under description.’ Accordingly, it is one thing to say of Oedipus that
he sometimes wished to enjoy marital relations with Jocasta, and quite another to say
reading.” Brown notes that Plato restates the partitioning principle at 439b3–6, and calls attention to the
differences in the restated version from the original version (Brown 2012: 60). The problems I discuss with
Plato’s application of the partitioning principle—however it is conceived—are not addressed by Brown,
however.
5 Kenny appears to understand Plato’s partitioning principle in this way, as “the principle of non-
contrariety.” (See Kenny 1969: esp. 232.)
that he sometimes wished to enjoy marital relations with his mother. We may fairly
suppose, given Sophocles’ telling of the tale, at least, that the former is true and the
latter is false, about Oedipus.
Once we recognize this feature of desires, however, two distinct possible interpretations
of (O), as it would apply to desires, are open to us, depending upon what we are will-
ing to count as ‘the same object.’ In one sense—the extensional sense—the woman
whom Oedipus desires is the same object as Oedipus’s mother. In another sense—the
intensional sense—these are different objects. Accordingly, we can understand (O) to
apply to cases of extensional identity, or to cases of intensional identity. Let us call these
alternatives ‘Oe’ for the extensional case applied to desires and ‘Oi’ for the intensional
case applied to desires:
(Oe) The same part of the soul cannot be responsible for both desiring and also
having an aversion to the same object at the same time, even if the object is taken, in
the desire and the aversion, under different descriptions.
(Oi) The same part of the soul cannot be responsible for both desiring and also
having an aversion to the same object at the same time, taken under the same
description.
Now, on the one hand, (Oi) looks like a very plausible principle—after all, it is difficult
to imagine how a person might both desire and also have an aversion to the same
thing at the same time, where the thing desired and shunned was represented in both
the desiring and in the shunning in the very same way. If such cases are possible at all,
it seems plausible to think that they would only be possible for someone with a wholly
bifurcated desire system, as for example, we might find in someone suffering from
multiple personality disorder.
It is anything but obvious, however, that this is the sort of case Plato has in mind. He
doesn’t tell us all the details about why his thirsty person refuses to drink, but he does
mention that the case he has in mind is one where the person has some reason to avoid
drinking, while what makes the person desire to drink is “the result of feelings and
diseases” (439d2). It looks as if the case, then, is one in which the person’s desire to drink
takes the intended object (say) as ‘thirst-quenching,’ whereas the same object is taken
by the opposed reason as ‘unhealthy.’ This, then, is more like the case with Oedipus
I mentioned earlier—the attraction and the repulsion represent the relevant object in
entirely different ways. If this phenomenon falls under any principle, then, it must be (Oe).
But as a partitioning principle, (Oe) is too strong, and if it is this principle that Plato
wishes to employ to divide the soul, his argument threatens to atomize the soul. Plato
wants it to turn out that all examples of thirst, hunger, and lust—and perhaps also all
desires for material acquisition—will belong to the appetitive part of the soul. All
anger, and presumably all desires for honor, as well as for victory and domination over
others, will belong to the high spirit or thumos. Calculation and reasoning belong to
the rational part. But cases may readily be found in which examples will fall under (Oe)
that would require Plato to partition the soul into more than three parts.
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Summoning Knowledge in Plato's

Republic Nicholas D. Smith

Summoning Knowledge in Plato’s Republic

PI. The Aim of This Book

P2. My Own Intended Readership

P3. Texts and Translations

Bibliography of Sources Cited 187

1.1 Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions

able to be an accountant, that is, to do accounting. If the commonplace in C1i is aptly

Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions of Knowledge and Education 3

1.1.2 Knowledge as an educational goal

Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions of Knowledge and Education 5

One thing we can immediately notice about propositional knowledge, however, is

Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions of Knowledge and Education 7

Plato’s Unfamiliar Conceptions of Knowledge and Education 9

1.2 A Precis of the Argument of this Book

3 See Segal 1978: 330; Brann 1967; Rosenstock 1983.

a precis of the argument of this book 11

Does Plato’s own condemnation of image-makers amount to a self-condemnation? In

1.2.2 The uses and abuses of images

a precis of the argument of this book 13

1.2.3 Mathematicians and knowledge

a precis of the argument of this book 15

1.2.4 Socrates as image-maker

a precis of the argument of this book 17

1.2.5 Plato as image-maker

14 For which, see D. Allen 2010: esp. chapter 2.

a precis of the argument of this book 19

1.2.6 Images of images of images and more

a precis of the argument of this book 21

2.1 Conceiving Justice through Images

2.2 Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State

Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State 25

2.2.2 Plato’s arguments for psychic division

Plato’s Analogy of Soul and State 27

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